The proliferation of video cameras along with increasing support for video sharing has resulted in escalating numbers of videos being captured. While increasingly plentiful storage allows for recording videos having longer durations, it is often tedious to view and navigate such videos, as users typically do not have time or patience to sift through minutes of unedited footage. A conventional technique to reduce the burden of watching long videos is to speed up such videos by creating time-lapse videos.
A time-lapse video can be played at a speed faster than real-time; thus, when played, time appears to be moving faster and thus lapsing. For example, an image of a scene may be captured once per second (e.g., recording only one frame per second), then played back at 30 frames per second; the resulting time-lapse video can have an apparent 30 times speed increase. According to another example, a video of the scene may be captured (at a given frame rate such as 30 frames per second) and all but one frame each second can be dropped; if the resulting video is played back at 30 frames per second, again the resulting time-lapse video can have an apparent 30 times speed increase.
When video is captured with a stationary camera, time-lapse videos are commonly effective; however, if a video is captured with a moving camera, the speed-up process accentuates apparent motion, resulting in a distracting and difficult to watch time-lapse video. Hyper-lapse videos are an emerging medium that addresses the difficulty of time-lapse videos captured with moving cameras by performing camera motion smoothing, or stabilization, in addition to the speed-up process. However, creating a hyper-lapse video by skipping all but every Xth frame (where X can be substantially any integer) can result in frames that are difficult to align; thus, even when stabilization techniques are applied to such frames, significant motion due to movement of the camera can remain in the resulting hyper-lapse video, thereby degrading the quality of the resulting hyper-lapse video.